Sakana AI

Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based AI research company that uses evolutionary optimization frameworks to discover and improve algorithms with far fewer compute samples than conventional approaches. Co-founded by Llion Jones, one of the original eight authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper that catalyzed the generative AI boom, and David Ha, who led Google Brain’s research team in Japan, the company builds smaller, specialized models that collaborate rather than pursue brute-force scaling. Rather than competing in a direct compute arms race against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Sakana AI takes a fundamentally different architectural approach, one that is intended to be cheaper, more energy-efficient, and culturally localized for non-English-speaking markets.